Alastair Campbell has told the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly that intelligence chief John Scarlett wrote the controversial dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Downing Street's Director of Communications, Mr Campbell was heckled by a handful of protesters as he arrived at the inquiry.
Alastair Campbell claimed he had urged Mr Scarlett to 'tone down' the dossier.
Mr Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), had wanted ownership of the document, said Mr Campbell.
'I emphasised that the credibility of this document depended fundamentally on it being the work of the JIC,' he said.
'I think there were areas where the language was too colourful. I also said the more intelligence-based it was, the better.'
BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan told Radio 4`s Today programme the dossier had been 'transformed' in the weeks before publication.
Mr Campbell admitted there had been other draft documents produced in the run-up to the version published last year.
However, he told the inquiry Mr Scarlett`s new dossier meant all of those papers, as it were, were redundant.
Weapons expert David Kelly apparently killed himself after being outed as the source of a BBC report alleging that a dossier on the threat posed by Iraq was embellished.
